Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis

Robert D. Kaplan, Hurst & Company

By – Jason Cowley

Robert Kaplan was one of the American journalists most committed to supporting the Iraq War until, as an reporter embedded with the US marines in Fallujah in 2004, he witnessed something worse even than the brutal tyranny of Saddam Hussain: the anarchy of a war of all against all as a blood-dimmed tide washed over the Middle East. As Iraq was ripped apart by murderous sectarianism Kaplan concluded that he had been wrong about the democratic renewal he believed would follow regime change and the collapse of the Baathist state.

The outcome he expected did not come to pass. Beneath the carapaces of tyranny in Iraq – and in Yemen, Syria and Libya - were “complete institutional voids”. Kaplan’s “mistake” - as he called it - was not to have thought tragically enough about what might happen in Iraq after Saddam had gone. The realisation that he was wrong and hundreds of thousands had died led to clincal depression and regrets that “burdened my sleep for decades”.

Kaplan wrote about his struggles with mental health and the failures of the Western liberal interventionism of the Bush and Blair years in The Tragic Mind (2023), in which he argues pessimism can be constructive in helping states avoid catastrophe. Would that Putin was more pessimistic.

What Kaplan does not say but is evident from The Tragic Mind and his new book, Waste Land, is that his “mistake” has made him a better writer: more circumspect, more humble, more self-questioning.

Kaplan is a “tragic realist”: he urges policymakers to think tragically so they may avoid tragedy. You could also call him a Hobbesian: “order must come before freedom”, he writes in Waste Land, “because without order there is no freedom for anyone”. Or, as Thomas Hobbes wrote in Levithian, without order imposed consensually by a sovereign, there can be: “No arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

In a long and varied career as a journalist, academic and adviser to the Pentagon, Kaplan has reported on some of the world’s most intractable conflicts – including the Balkan wars of the early 1990s about which he wrote an excellent book, Balkan Ghosts, and various West African civil wars. He is much more than a lanyard-wearing habiutee of the international conference circuit. He is a reporter. He goes out into the world and towards danger. But his wisdom has come at great personal cost.

Kaplan made his name with “The Coming Anarchy”, an essay published as an Atlantic magazine cover story in 1994 and later expanded into a book. “Anxious foresight”, as he now calls it, informs the work. Long before most commentators Kaplan understood how climate change, water shortages and resource scarcity, overpopulation, increased urbanisation, disease, and mass migration would destabilise our world in the 21^st century. He did not believe we had reached the end of history. Least of all that the end of the Cold War would herald a new era of Western liberal hegemony and world peace: he had seen the coming anarchy, and it made him fearful.

Today he is especially scornful of deluded liberals such as Al Gore who believed they were on the right side of history and proselytised about inflicting what Kaplan calls an “unadulterated capitalism” on post-Soviet Russia. “Optimism prevails universally among those who are familiar with what is going on in Russia,” Vice President Gore declared in 1998. On 31 December 1999, Boris Yeltsin resigned, and Putin became president of Russia.

In Waste Land – the title echoes TS Eliot’s great modernist poem of fragmentation and collapse – Kaplan begins by returning, “in a spirit of caution”, to Weimar Germany, a “cradle of modernity that gave birth to fascism and totalitarianism”. He believes the breakdown of the post-imperial German state and the rise of Hitler offer important lessons for today’s unstable world.

What he is saying, I think, is that we should not expect the near future to be like the present or recent past. “We have to be able to consider that literally anything can happen to us,” he says, reflecting on the German experience between the two world wars. This is the “usefulness” of Weimar, which had “no nightwatchman to keep the peace between its constituent parts”.

Our multipolar world also has no nightwatchman, and the so-called liberal rules-based order is crumbling. The new Trump administration will be avowedly neo-isolationist. European states are being forced, or will be, through necessity and self-interest to spend more of their national income on security and defence. Our planet is intimately connected and new technologies will only make it more so. The world and its conflicts are increasingly claustrophic. “Politics has rarely before been played out on such an intense, globespanning, and consequential level, even as electronic communications have made it abstract and therefore more extreme,” Kaplan writes, lamenting a public discourse of roiling passions ignited by social media. Another instance of anxious foresight, perhaps, when one considers Elon Musk’s trolling of Keir Starmer and unhinged interventions into European politics.

Kaplan is no Maga covert, but he is a conservative of a kind that is disappearing from public life. He is doubtful, cautious, sceptical, haunted by the violence he has seen. He seeks to understand the world even as he feels increasingly alienated from its worst excesses.

He apologises, in one section, for his excessive gloom and concedes that advances in science and technology have led to rising life expectancy for many, the overcoming of disease and reductions in world poverty. But this, he insists, is an age of permanent crisis and we should act with appropriate restraint and humility. “This fragile, finite earth of ours rests, above all, on moderation, which this new age of technology is fundamentally undermining.”

Kaplan writes in several different registers. He can be didactic, historical, elegiac but also polemical. There are bracing sections denouncing cancel culture and the “tyranny of perfect virtue in regard to race and foreign policy that has swarmed over our elite universities”. And there are disquisitions on conservative thinkers he admires, such as Henry Adams, Oswald Spengler and Alexsander Solzhenitsyn, the former Soviet exile who sought “the need for order above all else”. Order really matters to Kaplan because, on his travels through war zones and failed states, he has experienced so much disorder.

Waste Land can be read slowly to savour its complexities and historical resonances or in one sitting, as I first read it, compelled by the force of its arguments. This time Kaplan makes no specific predictions about what might happen in the world over the next five years other than to urge Western powers to prepare for even greater global instability.

Writing about Thomas Malthus, the economist and demographer, he says “social theorists may be judged by the questions they stimulate rather than by those they answer”. Similarly, you don’t have to agree with Robert Kaplan, or share his pessimism (I don’t), or expect answers from him to be stimulated by this provocative and wide-ranging book, which ends on a note of defiance as the author concedes that, because the direction of history is unknowable, we have “no choice but to fight on” as crises multiply.